Q: how is gay marriage like war in iraq?

A: in a word: politics. [fleshing this out could take a book, so i'm going to have to leave a lot out, such as that the war was unnecessary, unjust, illegal, immoral, &c.]

the growing number of retired officers who say lose rummy focus mainly on dandy donny's insistence on not enough troops to finish the job. few get into why he wanted to limit troop strength so radically.

as gen batiste pointed out, the reason is that the needed doubling of the force would've delayed the invasion at least 3 or 4 months and upped the cost enormously. that would've endangered bush's tax cut, thus losing the base and a second term.

bush's renewed call to amend the US constitution to ban gay marriage in order to protect the institution of marriage is another example of creating a problem from no problem. 45 states already ban gay marriage and won't recognize those performed in the few places that allow them, and those few have already shown they have no interest in making the rest change, plus we already have unchallenged federal, state, and local "defense of marriage" laws up the wazoo, so there won't be a national impact.

so why amend? the trouble is bush's poll numbers: only 3 states—utah, idaho, and wyoming—give him over 50% approval. (he didn't get texas?!)

dub still nurtures a fantasy that history will judge him kindly, but that depends on actually doing something of value, which, in turn, depends on keeping control of both houses of congress, so he has to mobilize his christian homophobe base again, as he did in '04 by putting marriage on 11 states' ballots. it wasn't cost effective—he only won states that went over 60% antigay—but it did the job of getting 4 more years.

now the base is grumbling that the boy they elected hasn't given them much of what they wanted, so he wants to expand the state referenda to a national one.

15 or 20 years ago, he figured out that many religious folk are so naïve they will cast caution to the wind, toss reason aside, and vote entirely on faith if you just keep talking up god. he didn't so much—as some say—find god at the bottom of a bottle as he found power beneath a bible.

in 2000 it fooled 'em once. '04, fooled 'em again. third time's the charm, but he seems to have run out of new ideas, and doing it essentially the same way as last time might stretch the envelope beyond its elastic limit.

does that mean da prez will bend himself into a pretzel? i wish.